4.3 with 2.6.21.7 kernel

Amazing! I'm posting right from Puppy 4.3 built with the old 2.6.21.7 kernel.

This kernel is about two years old. It was used back in Puppy 3.x and also retro 4.1x and 4.2x builds.

The thing is, I just built the Puppy live-CD with exactly the same packages as the main 4.3 build with 2.6.30.5 kernel. Some packages are supposed to be kernel-version sensitive. The kernel ALSA drivers are much older than the alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages.

But, everything works. I'm online using it right now, via wireless with Ndiswrapper.

I even had a bit of a pleasant surprise with the acx_pci driver. This PC has a Netgear WG311 wireless card, but I never was able to get the acx_pci driver to work with it. Now, it connects, DHCP works, but there is still a problem, /var/log/messages reports frame sizes to big.

There's probably an upgraded driver that would fix that, but I used Ndiswrapper and that works fine.

I also tested dialup on my other PC with Pctel 789 modem, that works too.

Media players work, everything works...

Oh, some news, 4.3 is going to be available with 2.6.30.5, 2.6.25.16 and 2.6.21.7 kernels.
They are uploading now, but you will have to wait several more hours due to ibiblio.org low transfer speed.

I'll announce when everything's ready.

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Comments

4.3
Username: charlie6
"Hi, [code]I'll announce when everything's ready. [/code] Woopie..! welcome to puppy 4.3 ! :-))

2.6.25.16 kernel
Username: BarryK
"Right now I'm running 4.3 with 2.6.25.16 kernel. I wanted to test Ndiswrapper, yep, it works. I did have a bit of difficulty though, which will need some more testing. I don't think that this is a kernel-version problem. Module ath_pci claims the wlan0 interface, and I chose to unmount it, which succeeded, but loading the ndiswrapper module failed -- it hung. What I had to do was go through the exercise first with ath_pci of scanning and getting a profile, save it, then choose to unmount ath_pci and load ndiswrapper. But, perhaps the recommendation of blacklisting ath_pci then rebooting would also have worked. Whatever, there are little quirks here and we do need someone working actively maintaining the Network Wizard. Um, Dougal is the maintainer, but I think he is hampered somewhat as he only has dialup -- which would make it difficult to play with all the latest stuff that I'm always uploading. Also he reported recently that one of his PCs failed. So, I'll help out by posting the latest 4.3 CD to Dougal. Dougal, if you need a donation of hardware let us know. Any other long-term developer who wants a CD, let me know.

Tags: woof